The Tavern

The performance is really, really, REALLY bad and Crawl is still played on online servers. The clouds aren't needed for any gameplay reason, just increase the wall density by a bit if you want.

Bad performance in a rarely entered portal is not a concern for online play, imo.

Why not? The portal is supposed to exist for testing it to potentially become an actual branch(elf replacement)...

PF made it sound like the entire point of the branch was to be based around the clouds so i think this is a good opportunity to figure out what is making the performance bad instead of sweeping the problem under the rug.

On cbro a single 5 press took about 10 seconds for me.

There has been some work done on cloud performance thanks to that portal. Clearly it hasn't been completely solved yet, but it seems worth doing.

Edit: I complained about that element of the portal too. I think it's a serious issue, but I'd like to see it fixed rather than wallpapered over.

I guess I don't see how the clouds are important to the branch.

The idea of vision blockers that are not movement or sound blockers causes a number of interesting tactical decisions in a large, open area with no real terrain to speak of. Since they often move, and can be dispelled by one of the enemies in the area, it makes combat mroe interesting than "choose walled position to stand your ground, fight here".

How about making Desolation's salt clouds nonmoving and immutable, instead of placing cloud generators? Surely that would speed up processing, and it could actually be said that a new terrain type is being experimented with.

Neither do I, frankly, seeing as how I haven't played .19 yet. However, PF's commit message did very clearly state that the portal was meant to be centered around the clouds (whether this is a success or failure, I don't know, and that's probably a matter for another thread). If it is a serious performance problem though (which again I don't know about, but I don't see why you'd lie about it), we should treat it like a performance problem, instead of making decisions that affect gameplay to try and hide it.